At the Washington Post, homophobia isn't even a misdemeanor

Think anti-gay bullying is just for small-town America? Look at the nation's capital.

The Smithsonian's behavior and the ensuing silence in official Washington are jarring echoes of those days when American political leaders stood by idly as the epidemic raged on.

...

It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian's surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" are rarely called out for what they are -- "bigotry disguised as prudence," in the apt phrase of Slate's military affairs columnist, Fred Kaplan. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has been granted serious and sometimes unchallenged credence as a moral arbiter not just by Rupert Murdoch's outlets but by CNN, MSNBC and The [Washington] Post's "On Faith" Web site even as he cites junk science to declare that "homosexuality poses a risk to children" and that being gay leads to being a child molester.

OK, the Washington Post isn't Rich's primary target, but I can't think of a better symbol of Washington's casual acceptance of gay-bashing than a newspaper that routinely grants a platform to anti-bay bigots and publishes anti-gay screeds -- and that regularly publishes and quotes the likes of Bill Donohue railing about purported anti-Catholic bias and bigotry without once noting his own history of anti-gay speech.

There's simply no way the Post would provide such a welcoming forum for anti-Semitic or racist commentary. But it doesn't have a problem with gay-bashing, or with treating anti-gay bigots as respectable figures.